Tactile Graphics Demo Fun

Sometimes at The Friendly Neighborhood Center for Extreme Computing   , instead of a more or less responsible adult, RantWoman shows up as a very large version of some much younger self. Today RantWoman was in kindergarten trying to color inside lines. Even though RantWoman had thick glasses and more or less had vision with the thick glasses, coloring inside the lines was not at all to be taken for granted.

The Demo Quilt

Kindergarten would have been SO much easier with tactile graphics.

The Friendly Neighborhood Center for Extreme Computing recently got some tactile Tactile View graphics software to run with our Braille Embosser. When we wrote the grant to fund it, interest was WAY out of proportion to the price of the software. Some program pieces have not quite come together; also a possible partner needs to be invited over to experiment. But the software is installed and RantWoman has been playing around with it.

A few days ago, RantWoman experimented with a photo of a quilt that RantWoman thought might have sufficiently clear lines to work well as a tactile image. Sort of.

Today RantWoman needed a break from her bulging inbox. In particular, RantWoman needed tactile observance of Valentine's Day and of St. Patrick's day.




Happy Valentine's Day

Find two images on the Google, one Valentine's Day, one St Patrick's Day.

Download

Use the Filter option to turn images into line drawings.

Fiddle with line width.

Figure out that if one pays attention about the title field, whatever one inputs will come out in uncontracted braille.

Figure out that if there is already text in an image, making the line thickness too strong can  make the text unreadable for tactile users.




Stylized Clover

Some sort of loading hiccup if one tries to upload to catalog. Okay. Good. Appears to be a copyright issue RantWoman needs to research but not today. Urk..

Much more fun on the horizon, if only to figure out all the options.